


Truth Over Time

by vampirecaligula



Series: historical mircea drabbles [2]
Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Family, Gen, Historical Hetalia, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-15
Updated: 2017-07-15
Packaged: 2018-12-02 16:47:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11513412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vampirecaligula/pseuds/vampirecaligula
Summary: Romania's memories are hazy and run the gamut of joyous to jaded, but even through all his struggles, it is the ones around him that saw him through.[a collection of Romania-centric drabbles through the years, featuring many other characters. companion to "Business"]





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mmmmmost of why i'm publishing these is because i honestly feel bad for having them just linger on my computer. aph romania was such a fundamental part of my life that ignoring them almost refuses to do that justice.
> 
> anyway, most of these, if not all, are unfinished. they reflect a lot of my own headcanons and indulgences, and will not always be historically accurate. i try to point out the cool stuff when i can. a LOT of characters and situations will be featured, so i'll be adding tags as i post these. i hope you enjoy!
> 
> human names:  
> romania -> mircea  
> moldova -> ciprian  
> prussia -> gilbert

> **early 1870s.**

“So who’s this little guy?” Gilbert’s words were natural, cheerful, but his gaze was inquisitive. “Anyone I should be concerned—Hey, kid, cut it out!”

Ciprian had sat down on Gilbert’s foot and tangled his limbs around the Prussian’s leg, looking up at him with cheery expectancy. When Gilbert looked at him, he shook his leg a little. “My name is Ciprian,” the boy chirped. Prussia glanced at Romania, confused.

“His name is Ciprian,” Romania translated. Romania seized Ciprian’s arms and tried to drag him away. The child’s grip was incredibly strong, though, and he clung to Gilbert like a barnacle. “Let _go_ ,” he hissed in Romanian.

“I won’t,” Ciprian replied firmly.

“Just Ciprian?” It was easy to tell that Prussia was going over his admittedly meager knowledge of Romanian geography, trying to find a region that matched the name.

It took an annoying amount of effort, but Romania managed to detangle Ciprian from Prussia’s leg and pick him up. He sat the boy on his waist, choking a bit when Ciprian threw his arms around his neck. “Y-es,” he managed, jostling Ciprian to get him to loosen his grip. “Just Ciprian, so far.”

“You really have no idea who he might be?”

“If I knew, why would I hide it from you?”

“I don’t know,” Prussia said. His tone was even. “Why?”

Romania scowled. Ciprian wasn’t a heavy child – worryingly skinny, on the contrary – but his constant squirming made him a pain to hold. _It could be worse_ , the optimistic part of him said. _He could be you_. The thought made him shudder; memories of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries contained mostly violence and hardship. “Trust me,” Romania said, “when I figure this out, you’ll be the first person I tell.” _Mostly because I have no idea how to care for a child_ went unsaid.

Prussia seemed satisfied with the answer. He handed off the insane amount of books and papers he was carrying to a private who walked by, giving him a few orders in German, before turning back to Romania and Ciprian. “You hungry, kid?”

Romania repeated the question, and Ciprian responded with an enthused “ _Da_!”

Gilbert chuckled. “ _That_ word I know,” he said. “Come on, the kitchens won’t be too damn crowded right now. We’ll get him something to eat.”

They settled Ciprian at one of the tables with a crude sandwich and some leftover sausage. Prussia pulled brandy out of a cabinet, which Romania gratefully accepted. “You wanna tell me what happened?”

The brandy was a Prussian brew, not nearly as strong as the țuică Romania was used to, but a pinch was a pinch. He related how he’d walked into his bedroom to find Ciprian hiding in the curtains, convinced that they were playing hide-and-seek and had been doing so for a while.

“And he speaks fluent Romanian,” Prussia mused. He took a sausage from Ciprian’s plate and broke it in half, keeping one half for himself despite Ciprian’s protests. He tickled Ciprian beneath the chin; the boy’s peals of laughter had all the lighthearted innocence of childhood, and Romania’s heart melted.

“Well he certainly doesn’t speak German,” Romania said.

“I’ll have to fix that, then, German’s a great language.” Prussia picked up the brandy bottle and held it in front of Ciprian’s face. _“Die Flasche_ ,” he said, slowly and clearly. “Say that.”

“Bottle,” Ciprian replied in Romanian. Prussia’s expression was nothing short of comical.

“Sorry, Gilbert.” Romania smirked. “This one isn’t yours.”

Prussia set the bottle back on the table and picked up Ciprian’s now-empty dishes, handing them over to one of the kitchen maids. Ciprian slid out of his seat to follow her. “We’ll get to that later,” he said. “Does he speak the common language?”

Romania opened his mouth to answer before realizing that he actually didn’t know. In the surprise of finding Ciprian, he hadn’t bothered to check. “I don’t know. I didn’t find out.”

“That should’ve been the first thing you did.”

“Like you did everything right the first time.” Romania’s eyes didn’t leave the boy, who was now being taught how to properly scrub a plate. The maid seemed confused and a little taken aback at his enthusiasm.

“I didn’t have to, everyone took care of _that_ part for me.” Gilbert sighed in exasperation. “I’d known Ludwig was gonna come along for ages, it was only a matter of time. They actually handed him over to me, I didn’t find him. ‘Here, Beilschmidt,’ they said. ‘This one’s yours. Don’t fuck it up.’ And I didn’t.” He sat back in his chair with a self-satisfied grin.

“As much as I _love_ your advice, Gilbert,” Romania said, “this situation is a tad different.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.”

There was a bout of silence before Gilbert said, “You know who you should ask?”

“If you say the Hohenzollerns. . . .” Romania let the sentence hang in midair. He liked the current ruling house. He really actually did. They were doing for his people what Cuza and even Mircea cel Ban couldn’t, and he couldn’t ever remember being this happy with life. But he would go through nine circles of Hell before he told the _government_ about Ciprian. It wasn’t a risk he was willing to take.

“No, of course not.” _He would have told them._ “I was gonna say England. That Kirkland bastard has found and raised more Nation kids on his own than anyone else in the world, except maybe the Iberians. He’s probably the worst parent, too, but he might at least be able to help you figure out who the kid belongs to.”

“I don’t need to know that,” Romania said a little venomously. “He belongs to me.”

“I didn’t say he didn’t.” Prussia’s words were cautious, his expression neutral. Romania had see those combinations before many times – usually just before _This is for your own good_ or _We’re not trying to hurt you_. It was condescending, and he loathed it. “Just that you should try to be sure. It hasn’t even been a day, Mircea, how can you know anything for certain?”

 _I just know_ , he thought. It was a feeling he had, an absolute conviction that Ciprian was meant for him. In the same way he knew that the sun would rise every morning, and that the world would never be without a war, he knew that Ciprian was a nation and that he was Romanian.

But he couldn’t say that to Prussia – to be fair, Gilbert was easily the most understanding of all the Germanic nations, and with Mircea he shared a love of abstract concepts and trust in gut instinct. But he was still Prussian, and his concrete, logical side won over too much for Romania to bet on.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Romania's efforts to keep his brother a secret become futile in one fell swoop.

> **early 1870s.**

Ciprian sat quietly across from Romania, swinging his legs every so often as his feet didn’t touch the floor.  On the table between them sat a small reading primer, the kind with simple words and inked illustrations.  It’d been difficult to find, but Romania had never found pulling strings a challenge.

“What’s this one again?”

“ _Â din a_ ,”  Romania explained a little shortly.  The challenge hadn’t been procuring the materials.  It was in maintaining enough patience to sit through hours of learning and review.  “We went over that.”

Ciprian was an impressively quick child – quick and quiet, and good with his hands.  Letters hadn’t given him too much difficulty, but because of that Romania had moved him on to words and was beginning to regret the decision.  “ _Câine_ ,” he slowly sounded out, looking up at Romania for confirmation.

“Don’t look at me, look at the book.”

“The book’s too hard,” Ciprian protested.

“No, it’s not.  It’s this or the Bible, which was how I learned.”  Romania pointed at the horrifically thick, leather-bound volume intimidatingly placed at the other end of the table.  It hadn’t actually been opened more than perhaps once a month, and certainly hadn’t been used in lessons – had they  _had_ Bibles in Istanbul? — but Ciprian didn’t need to know that.

Ciprian swallowed and turned back to his primer, his brow furrowed in concentration.

_How old are you. . . ?_

It was a question that had been bouncing through Romania’s head for weeks now.  Physically, Ciprian was  _tiny_ – but Romania wasn’t sure how much of that was age, how much was nature, and how much had to do with Nationhood.  He’d been small too as a child.  (He was still small, though he would hardly admit that.)  And despite the trouble reading gave him, Ciprian was leaps and bounds ahead of any other boy his size.

It didn’t help that he still didn’t know who Ciprian was.  He had a few theories, but none of them  _quite_ fit according to his (regrettably finite) knowledge of Nationhood, or were too nervewracking to consider for more than a few minutes.  And then it was quite possible that Ciprian wouldn’t come into his own for decades yet — Romania’s mother, Dacia, had had him long before her decline.

Romania didn’t want to think about declining when he hadn’t even declared independence.

Ciprian stopped abruptly in the middle of one of the lines.  “What time is it?” he asked.

He was just as bored and probably ten times more stressed than Romania was.  “Ah,” Romania mused, glancing at the window.  The sun was high in the sky.  “Almost dinner?”

There was a knock at the door.

Romania signed for Ciprian to be silent.  Ciprian nodded and covered his hands with his mouth; it had been only months, but he knew enough about his brother to ask questions later. 

Romania opened the door a crack.

“ _Zdravstvuyte,_ Romania!  Hello!” the newcomer said in Russian.  “I am Ivan Braginsky; we have met a few times.”

The Russian Empire was tall and broad, though not quite as tall and broad as people were often led to believe.  He was a well-meaning man, if a little violent and imperialistic in nature, but who in this side of Europe was not?   _He’s not Turkey_ , was the mantra repeated over and over again, and Romania held that in his mind now. 

“Of course,” Romania said, smiling brilliantly.  Behind his back, he waved for Ciprian to get out of the room; the last thing he wanted on his brother’s tail was an ambitious empire.  “I’m a big fan, really.”  His Russian was not fantastic, but he’d had a few years to learn.

“Thank you, thank you.”  Russia tapped his foot.  “May I step in. . . ?”

“Yes, certainly!  Sorry about that.” 

Ciprian was gone.  Romania picked up the books they’d been using before Russia could see them, apologizing for the mess.

“It is nothing,” Russia said.

“Can I get you anything?”

“Yes, actually.  I am looking for Prussia – I have business I wanted to discuss with him and Austria-Hungary, but I thought I might stop here first since he has been seen here increasingly often.”

Gilbert, being exactly the ambitious upstart so many older nations accused him of, had gradually worn away at most of his alliances in pursuit of unification for the German states.  Romania didn’t blame him for that.  Unification felt great, and ultimately would make a much stronger nation, perhaps on par with any other empire in Europe.  But Romania was hardly in a position where he could piss people off like that – hence his cooperation with Russia, the only one who cared to oppose the old Ottomans.

“Oh, um,” Romania began.  There was no sign of Ciprian anywhere, save for the opposite door which was slightly askew.  “He went to war with France not a month ago and set off for the front lines.  I can’t tell you how long he’ll be gone, but at this point he’s far from here.”

Russia nodded.  “I see.  I’ll just have to continue on then.”

“Yes, you will.”   _Please leave._

As if he could hear Romania’s thoughts, Russia gazed steadily at him and sighed.  “Ah, well, I wish I could stay longer to visit!  It is not often we meet each other.  But unfortunately, in these tense days I haven’t a good deal of time on my hands.”

“Regrettable, truly,” Romania said.  He quickly moved to get the door, but as Russia stood, there was a clattering from the hall.  Romania cringed.   _God in Heaven—_

“What was that?” 

“A rat, probably, I have a lot of them.  Maybe a mouse.”  Or something else.  All manner of creatures showed up in Romania’s house, but they were written off as fiction by all but the lowest class.

“That was an awfully loud noise for a rat,” Russia said, frowning. 

“Could be a cat.”

“Do you keep cats?”

“I do,” Romania lied easily.  “I’ll have to introduce you next time, since you’re in such a rush.”

Russia’s face lit up like a child’s.  It would have made anyone feel guilty.  “Oh, no no!  I love cats and the like, please introduce me now!  Business can wait!”

Rather than guilt, nervous irritation twisted in Romania’s stomach.  “They’re probably gone by now.  They mostly fend for themselves.”

“No harm in looking, is there?”

“Well—“

But Russia had already pulled open the door to the hall and was stepping inside.

_Come on, Ciprian_ , Romania prayed silently, staying in the front room.   _Just like our games._

At first, all seemed fine—there were no sounds save for Russia’s boots on the wooden floor.  Romania kept his breathing steady.  For all he knew, Russia could sense fear. 

“Ah!” he heard Russia cry.  “What is this, then?”

Romania’s heart skipped a beat when Ciprian replied, in flawless Russian: “Are you even playing this game?”

“What game is it we are playing, little one?”

“I hide, and you find me, and then we switch.”

“Oh, that sounds like a lot of fun! Who is it I am playing with?”

“My name is Ciprian.”

“Just Ciprian, hmm? You are Romanian?”

“Yes! Who are you?”

Russia was cheerful and friendly, even – Romania could picture the Nation, so strangely large in comparison, crouching before Ciprian’s hiding place. The perfect grandfather character. “I am Mr. Ivan Braginsky! But most people call me Mr. Russia.”

“It’s your turn to hide, Mr. Russia!”

“Oh, it is? I am very sorry little Ciprian, but I actually need to be going. I will play with you next time, _da_?”

“ _Da_!”

Russia appeared in the doorway, his hand on Ciprian’s shoulder. Ciprian didn’t seem to realize anything was wrong until he saw Romania’s face – which Romania quickly changed into a mask of pleasantry. Russia’s smile was bigger than ever; he seemed to glow from it, but his eyes were questioning. _I know your boy is a Nation_ , they said. _It is only a question of whom._ “Did you hear that, Mr. Romania?” he asked. “Your boy speaks Russian! How incredible, for one so young to speak so well. He must have been born speaking it.”

“Yes, it is impressive,” Romania agreed. _Smile. Pleasantly. Nothing is wrong._ “He’s got the quickest mind I’ve seen in centuries.”

“You must bring him by sometime,” Russia said. “I would love to catch up, learn more about your family. Perhaps over the holidays?”

“We’ll see.”

Russia turned to Ciprian, bending over to look him in the eye. “Make sure your brother lets you write, little one,” he said. “I would hear from you!”

“I don’t know how to write yet, though,” Ciprian protested.

“It is not difficult. I could teach you.”

“Okay!”

Russia ran a hand through the boy’s hair, said his good-byes, and walked out the door, smiling the entire time.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ** historical notes **
> 
> 1.  _Had they had Bibles in Istanbul?_  
>  i think they would have.  the nations under turkey’s care, at least; whether or not they _cared_ is a different story.  most people circa that era used one to learn to read but i doubt ro would have; when he started reading, it wouldve been romanian cyrillic.
> 
> 2.  _Dacia had had him long before her decline._  
>  modern romanians are descended from proto-romanians, or a mixture of soldiers from the roman empire and the people occupying the dacian area.  since some hetalians appeared before the nations themselves (e.g., america, prussia), I personally use that as a general rule.  this is also why i’m having aph moldova show up in the 1870s as opposed to much later.
> 
> 3.  _He still didn’t know who Ciprian was._ _  
> _ ciprian is not the moldavian region.  modern moldova does contain some of older moldavia, but it is more largely the area known as bessarabia.  thus i’ve chosen to have him represent modern moldova and subsequently bessarabia, later to become the moldavian soviet socialist republic in 1940.  this decision was made partially because he is so young in canon, and partially because of the territorial differences between moldavia and modern moldova.
> 
> _ 6.  I’m a big fan, really. _ _  
>  _ make no mistake, russia’s status as ‘not turkey or austria’ makes it pretty damn appealing at this point.  romania doesn’t trust them, but mostly because romania doesn’t trust anyone. 
> 
> 5.  _I am looking for Prussia, actually.  I have business I want to discuss with him and Austria-Hungary._ _  
> _ after the wars of german unification, people began to think of gilbert as a no good dirty-rotten land-stealing young upstart of a nation.  (people thought that before, but it was more obvious now.)  russia – who was just _looking_ for a reason to start a fight with turkey over possession of the slavic/eastern orthodox countries – was left as his only supporter.
> 
> 6.  _He went to war with France not a month ago._ _  
> _ the final war of german unification – the franco-prussian war – began on july 19th, 1870.


End file.
